Re: The Three Myths of XML

From: Uche Ogbuji <uche.ogbuji@fourthought.com>

To: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@ingr.com>

Date: Sun, 17 Jun 2001 12:46:17 -0600 (MDT)

> Kendall Grant Clark has published a funny satire
> of the three myths of XML at www.xml.com this week.
> It makes good reading. I wonder how many still
> subscribe to such myths and why.
You described Clark's article precisely: "satire". I don't think there
are many people in positions of dangerous influence who ascribe to the
described "magical thinking". I certainly wouldn't have thought Alan
Kotok to be one of them, given his involvement in the XML-EDI group, and
given the long and rancorous debates about inflated XML promises on that
group between EDI traditionalists and XML boosters. I'd like to assume
Clark quotes Kotok quite out of context, because I have to agree that the
excerpts that appear in Clark's article are worthy of satire.
However, I think in the real world, where everyone has more work to do
than dreams to dispense, that no one really believes in XML as magick.
Robin cover wrote about these matters back in 1998 in his paper on
Semantic Transparency, and I've written about them more recently in my
"Thinking XML" column.
coniuratores consilia sua mirabile esse non putant
loosely: conspirators shouldn't drink too much of their own Kool-Aid.
--
Uche Ogbuji Principal Consultant
uche.ogbuji@fourthought.com +1 303 583 9900 x 101
Fourthought, Inc. http://Fourthought.com
4735 East Walnut St, Ste. C, Boulder, CO 80301-2537, USA
Software-engineering, knowledge-management, XML, CORBA, Linux, Python